Farming bodies, suppliers, the waste management and recycling industries, the Environment Agency and Government joined forces last week to consider how to achieve the sustainable management of plastic waste from farms.

In a conference organised by the Agricultural Waste Stakeholders‘‘ Forum at Regents College Conference Centre in London (14 October) a wide range of participants were brought together to consider an action plan for a nationwide farm plastics collection and recovery scheme.

With timing bordering on prescience, the Resource Recovery Forum chose this event to launch our newest report "Farm packaging waste - proposals for a UK collection and recovery scheme". RRF members will be receiving their own copies within the next week or ten days.

The conference came in advance of new legislation that will bring agricultural waste under environmental control in line with other business sectors. The findings of the conference will be used to inform Defra‘‘s consultation on the new Regulations which are expected soon.

Farms produce more than 80,000 tonnes of waste plastic a year. It includes plastic packaging, such as fertiliser bags, animal feed bags and agrochemical containers, as well as non-packaging plastics, like silage films, crop covers and tunnel films.

Burning waste plastics - either in the open or in a drum incinerator - is the current disposal option for most farmers. Open burning pollutes the environment and poses health risks to farmers, farm workers and local communities and will therefore be banned on the introduction of the new Regulations. The use of drum incinerators to burn plastics will be phased out. Farmers will also have to stop using their existing dumps before the Regulations come into force - unless they obtain a landfill permit which will be an uneconomic option. Surveys confirm that most farmers would participate in a nationwide plastics recovery programme4.

Commenting after the conference Steve Lee, Chief Executive Officer of the Charted Institute of Waste Management said: "Its an important waste stream, with over 120,000 tonnes of high value plastics which we would rather see recycled and recovered rather than disposed of in landfill sites. There are several successful small local schemes and we would be delighted to see them working nationwide. However, we need a mandatory national scheme with full statutory backing."

The Agricultural Industries Confederation‘‘s consultant Rob Wise initiated the conference in his role as Chairman of the Forum‘‘s Recovery, Reuse and Recycling Subgroup. "Bringing all these players together is creating the momentum necessary to get practical solutions in place which will offer best value for farmers," he said. "We will feed the ideas from the conference into the Government‘‘s consultation and, taken together with our request for landfill tax funding, it should enable us to get things off the ground."